As long as guilt and responsibility are so diffuse, no justice or corrective measures are likely to be forthcoming, whether it be Bopal, Enron, Monsanto, or Microsoft.
My personal belief is that the corporate veil needs to end. Not the "limited liability" concept of stock holding, but whatever legal fiction that allows a person to dump benzene in a stream feeding into a river which feeds into a reservoir and then is drunk by thousands, causing millions of dollars in damages (cancer treatments, lost days at work, death) and get away with it because his truck had a magnetic sticker slapped on the side.
When we start holding the guy who turns the switch off on the electric plant responsible for billions of dollars in economic damages or trying the employees of these companies for that THEY committed "in the name of the company" then the problem will solve itself, post-haste. Nobody is going to help the higher-ups cover up the fact that their drugs cause heart attacks when they're going to be facing manslaughter charges for their part in their deaths. Boss wants you to dump that barrel of Chemical X instead of paying to have it disposed of properly? What's the minimum sentence for thousands of counts of poisoning?
Is this actually true? I would like to ask Mr. Lutz for a cite or three to back this assertion.
It seems reasonable at first blush, after all, unless you just LOVE sitting in your car idling down the freeway for hours a day, you probably want to live somewhere close to work. The average distance from home to work in Los Angeles is 8.2 miles (pdf), which includes claims that this is "consistent" with census data (except that it looks like the Census doesn't report distance, they report travel time) and compares with other metropolitan areas. This (another pdf) says that the average first job for people going off welfare is 6.5 miles away. This PDF claims that work causes people to drive an average of 12 miles per day. This site says that over 1/3 of workers in the 100 largest cities drive more than 10 miles to work.
But then again, if these companies are providing employment, closing them down could be bad for the workers in the country.
Or the Foundation could spend a few extra million bucks to clean up the smokestacks. But that would require being a charity, which investment firms aren't.
It's an analogy to the alleged censorship the telecoms would use on content providers that don't pay up. It's basically the worst penalty that T-Mobile can threaten their own customers with. It would be foolish...but then, isn't it foolish for an ISP to threaten its own customers with censorship?
It's still a terrible analogy. If we have to deal with analogies like this, then we might as well just turn the whole damn internet off to save us all from child porn.
If T-Mobile lies, wouldn't they be guilty of fraud?... "Hey, switch to Cingular, because we don't lie to you like T-Mobile?"
Sure, as soon as you can prove in court that they're lying. Prove that the shitty reception is T-Mobile's fault when the T-Mobile customers can talk to each other crystal clear. Prove that the Cingular user really was there waiting for their phone to ring. Absent some smoking gun memo, you're going to have a seriously uphill battle.
It all depends on what the agreement was between you and the post office.
There's an "agreement" beyond "take money, deliver letter"? Someone claimed I had a nauseating sense of entitlement, why would I not be "entitled" to a service or good I paid an agreed amount for?
Both ISPs are necessary to complete the transaction.
Well, now it's a transaction between ISP 1 and ISP 2. Why is ISP 2 billing some random company instead of billing ISP 1?
"Sophistry" and "Entitlement". Right. So if I pay for the packets, why should Google have to pay for them? If Google pays for packets, why should I have to pay for them? If the ISP refuses to separate this into different services, then why should they bill both of us for the same service?
Wonder when it got to the point where expecting the service one pays for was "entitlement".
but what would happen if T-Mobile told the Cingular customer that he or she must sign a contract with T-Mobile for $1000/minute, or else T-Mobile will cut off the T-Mobile customer's service? What if T-Mobile announced that every person in the world must pay $1000/minute in order to prevent it from cutting off that T-Mobile customer's service?
At worst, if the Cingular Customer refused to pay T-Mobile, T-Mobile would refuse to let their customer call the Cingular Customer. If none of the Cingular users paid, then the T-Mobile users wouldn't have their phone service cut off (where the hell did this idea come from?) they simply wouldn't be able to call any Cingular users. Of course, if they tried, it would just ring forever (or have shitty line quality, or be redirected to a paying customer, or...), after all, if T-Mobile told their customers the truth about why their friends aren't answering the phone, they might lose customers.
Or, if you don't like that analogy, how about the mail? I pay to send mail. If I send more mail, I pay more. I pay and send you a letter, and your post office calls me and tells me they have your letter, but I'll need to pay again in order to have it delivered. Google pays their ISP to send packets. They pay their ISP more to send more packets. Now your ISP is calling.
The average slashdotter would say "yes", but the average libertarian would respond with "Why did the government grant T-Mobile a monopoly? Let's fix that." Personally, I'm with the libertarians.
Sure, let's see the government break ATT again, while simultaneously breaking all of the franchise contracts across the country. What, it's not going to happen any time soon? Well, then I guess we diverge. I'll go with "slap this bandaid on it to keep it from bleeding out and dying", you go with "oooo pretty red fountain". Meanwhile, I'll go back to saving my pennies so I can start a company to run conduit underneath cities and sell space to anyone who wants, putting an end to the natural monopoly. Should only take a few million years at my current pay rate.
Also, if you're going to complain that network neutrality is "communism" then you're going to have to talk REAL fast to cover Edward Whitacre's apparent belief that they somehow "deserve" payment for Google's success. After all, isn't taking from the successful and giving to the rest the very essence of communism?
I'd even go further, if they charge me to use a service that's already paid for by Google, then I believe that is essentially fraud. If SBC/ATT does start charging Google every time I visit their website, then I should receive a rebate or at least a credit on my account for the amount of service ATT provided to me that Google paid for.
I can then use the extra money to pay for all of the formerly free services that suddenly had to start paying 5000 ISPs instead of just their own ISP.
Net neutrality *actually* means everyone pays the same for net use, regardless of how much they use the net.
Net non-neutrality means people pay according to how much they use.
Two things:
1) AT&T sold me "unlimited internet access". If they wanted me to pay for how much I use, they should have specified that in the contract. 2) AT&T does not have a contract with Google and therefore has no real right to charge Google anything, since Google does not use their ISP service, I use it.
Or are you going to claim that if you have a Cingular cellphone and call a friend with a T-Mobile cellphone, then T-Mobile has the right to bill you an unspecified amount (say... $1000/minute, it's not like I have a contract letting me know how much I'm going to be billed for the call in advance) for the call in addition to what I paid Cingular?
Akamai isn't controlling the bandwidth to my house, if CNN pays for it and MSNBC does not, it does not somehow make MSNBC slower than it was before CNN paid, furthermore Akamai is not competing with MSNBC or CNN as the current internet providers are with VoIP services like Vonage.
It's a nice feel-good piece about how having money gets you places, but it has absolutely nothing to do with SBC's (now ATT) CEO demanding that they somehow deserve some of Google's money. In the section where the interviewer asks "what if there's only one ISP" he talks about how there's plenty of competition for "ISP services" like email while entirely glossing over the fact that if you've only got one ISP, and the ISP decides you only get to use their email (or VoIP or blog or...), you're boned.
He also throws out the tired old stuff about packet inspection and worm filtering, but in a world where the stated goal of the ISPs is specifically to attack Google, the "network non-neutrality" they are after will do none of this. It will look no farther than "did this packet come from a company that paid their protection fees this month" and deal with it appropriately, after all, the more they do the more expensive their equipment gets.
Bottom line, my opinion, users are not lazy, they just want to get some work done without needing the equivalent of a Bachelor's in Computer Science to get that work done.
The problem is that people insist that everything be as simple as a toaster, regardless of the actual complexity of the task. It's easy to say "narrow down the task until it fits", it's harder to figure out how to drive a car using one rarely-used slider and one button.
It was the soon to be disbanded Oil for food program
Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of corruption (from many different companies and countries, including at least one US oil company), replaced by a billion dollar program that would "pay for Iraqi's reconstruction" with such wonderful things as KBR spending $75 million of our taxes failing to build a pipeline its own consultants said could not be built. And now we have US judges basically green-lighting rampant fraud against Americans by claiming that even if a company has a contract with "The United States of America", the US has no legal jurisdiction to charge companies with fraud when they do things like steal forklifts and sell them to the government. Of course, the US (or the CPA the US created to rule Iraq if you're seriously going to consider it somehow not a part of the US) can't even account for somewhere between 8 and 9 Billion dollars, I guess we're really showing the UN "how it's done".
After all the flack that GWB took for not stopping 9-11 when there was intel
Almost all of that flack was fired back when the Republicans started attacking Clinton for not doing anything about it either. Funny how that works, when it's convenient, Republicans call it "wagging the dog", likewise when it's convenient, it suddenly becomes "not doing anything". The same behavior pops up in other situations as well, after all, who needs innocent until proven guilty, except for DeLay?
why would you support attacking N. Korea and NOT support attacking Iraq?
Hindsight is 20/20? We know now that the intelligence was incorrect at best (suicides of British naysayers notwithstanding), so there's less reason to support the Iraq war, especially after we dug Saddam out of his little hole and no longer have to worry about those 1.5 million people killed and his planned attacks on America and his WMDs old or new. Now our soldiers are standing around over there, with no apparent plan beyond "surge another 40k troops and hope that the soldiers somehow convince the Sunnis and the Shiites to kiss and make up their centuries of hatred". Most likely, there'll be civil war, and since nobody in our government learns from history, we'll support one side, they'll win, and the other side will be pissed off and start blowing up our buildings while the side we supported uses the weapons we gave them against our allies.
As for Korea, we can continue this better safe then sorry ideal, but maybe, just maybe, we should talk to South Korea first and make sure they're ready to deal with a northern vacuum. Who knows, maybe we can just walk in, be greeted with parades and flower girls, catch ol' Kim in a few days, and South Korea will just take over from there and the war will cost less than redrawing all the maps. Probably no chance in hell of that though, but why can't we all dream like the Republicans?
Not to start an argument, but if the "constant barrage of unconstitutionality" baffles you then maybe, just maybe, your interpretation of unconstitutionality is wrong?
I don't know, given the reactions of the Republicans who naturally trotted out the "changing presidents during a war is a sign of weakness!" despite the fact that we've done it many times now, I'd say that they certainly believe an impeachment could succeed.
The much deeper question is whether violating the Constitution or his oath of office is actually an impeachable offense. With his signing statement in direct opposition to the law he signed and swore to execute faithfully, he has apparently done both.
I'm sure the Capital-One mailings are worth opening. Might be something in those about setting off a nuclear bomb somewhere.
The government has already frozen accounts of a person for trying to pay off his credit cards. Who knows, maybe this "Capital-One" is actually a terrorist outfit, the government certainly appears to believe Mastercard is.
Aside from that, without an oversight process, your Capital One mailings probably ARE worth opening, to the right people. After all, it's not like they have to explain to anyone why they were opening them, and you're certainly not going to notice if one or two go missing.
95% of it are just crappy ass Capital-One credit card offers anyways.
And all of the highly paid employees who will be assigned to read your mail are angels who would never be tempted to misplace some of your identity, right?
Finally, if you are a law abiding American citzen or law abiding resident then you should have nothing to worry about.
Here in Houston I can give you an entire litany of the government attacking law abiding citizens, from the "K-Mart raid" to "DNA lab scandals" to "'incorrect' expert testimony" (funny how the prosecutors never get around to prosecuting their own witnesses for perjury, isn't it? They always claim it was a "mistake" yet my tax money still goes to these so-called "experts") to "corrupt district attorney".
So, simply put, your statement is wrong. Have a nice day, though:)
You still have this idea that the government is not censoring anyone, but when sheriffs detain you for calling the head of the TSA an idiot, you lose. There is no legitimate argument to support that. It has nothing to do with security or bomb threats, or any other potentially legitimate excuse. Just because the government hasn't smashed in my skull for claiming Bush is an idiot doesn't change the fact that the government has detained people for calling members of the federal government idiots.
It only has to happen once for the government to have crossed the line. It happened, the line was crossed.
He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Now that he is directly countermanding the bills he passes, can we not finally admit that Bush has broken his oath as President?
but rather his view of the law.
Or are you claiming is that despite "his view of the law" he's not going to order anyone to open mail?
by being cooperatively owned by those who live on them.
This is a double edged weapon as well. I've heard of cases where companies who wanted to raze everything and redevelop the neighborhood into something else managed to buy 51% of the houses in the neighborhood, then used their majority to force the community to repave all the roads. Repeatedly. Until the people who had refused to sell their houses were driven out by hundred thousand dollar bills for the pavement.
Although your point about the phone network is possible, there are other ways to subsidize than to create monopolies.
What the government should have done is install and maintain conduit, which would have solved the "natural monopoly" problem in the first place by providing ample space for X companies to run N strands of wire/fiber/whatever without the "oh noes, my road is being torn up every three months" syndrome of letting them run the wire themselves.
But hey, this way they could get megabucks from corporations in return for promising them the ability to deliver shitty service.
Years ago, when I grew up in Texas, our legislature only met every other year because every time they met, new laws got passed.
It's still that way, it's always been that way, and for the foreseeable future I think I can safely say that we're still not going to trust them enough to let those rascals get together any more often than that.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as guilt and responsibility are so diffuse, no justice or corrective measures are likely to be forthcoming, whether it be Bopal, Enron, Monsanto, or Microsoft.
My personal belief is that the corporate veil needs to end. Not the "limited liability" concept of stock holding, but whatever legal fiction that allows a person to dump benzene in a stream feeding into a river which feeds into a reservoir and then is drunk by thousands, causing millions of dollars in damages (cancer treatments, lost days at work, death) and get away with it because his truck had a magnetic sticker slapped on the side.
When we start holding the guy who turns the switch off on the electric plant responsible for billions of dollars in economic damages or trying the employees of these companies for that THEY committed "in the name of the company" then the problem will solve itself, post-haste. Nobody is going to help the higher-ups cover up the fact that their drugs cause heart attacks when they're going to be facing manslaughter charges for their part in their deaths. Boss wants you to dump that barrel of Chemical X instead of paying to have it disposed of properly? What's the minimum sentence for thousands of counts of poisoning?
The Foundation does not own those smokestacks.
Charities own little kids with cancer?
Is this actually true? I would like to ask Mr. Lutz for a cite or three to back this assertion.
It seems reasonable at first blush, after all, unless you just LOVE sitting in your car idling down the freeway for hours a day, you probably want to live somewhere close to work. The average distance from home to work in Los Angeles is 8.2 miles (pdf), which includes claims that this is "consistent" with census data (except that it looks like the Census doesn't report distance, they report travel time) and compares with other metropolitan areas. This (another pdf) says that the average first job for people going off welfare is 6.5 miles away. This PDF claims that work causes people to drive an average of 12 miles per day. This site says that over 1/3 of workers in the 100 largest cities drive more than 10 miles to work.
But then again, if these companies are providing employment, closing them down could be bad for the workers in the country.
Or the Foundation could spend a few extra million bucks to clean up the smokestacks. But that would require being a charity, which investment firms aren't.
It's an analogy to the alleged censorship the telecoms would use on content providers that don't pay up. It's basically the worst penalty that T-Mobile can threaten their own customers with. It would be foolish...but then, isn't it foolish for an ISP to threaten its own customers with censorship?
... "Hey, switch to Cingular, because we don't lie to you like T-Mobile?"
It's still a terrible analogy. If we have to deal with analogies like this, then we might as well just turn the whole damn internet off to save us all from child porn.
If T-Mobile lies, wouldn't they be guilty of fraud?
Sure, as soon as you can prove in court that they're lying. Prove that the shitty reception is T-Mobile's fault when the T-Mobile customers can talk to each other crystal clear. Prove that the Cingular user really was there waiting for their phone to ring. Absent some smoking gun memo, you're going to have a seriously uphill battle.
It all depends on what the agreement was between you and the post office.
There's an "agreement" beyond "take money, deliver letter"? Someone claimed I had a nauseating sense of entitlement, why would I not be "entitled" to a service or good I paid an agreed amount for?
Both ISPs are necessary to complete the transaction.
Well, now it's a transaction between ISP 1 and ISP 2. Why is ISP 2 billing some random company instead of billing ISP 1?
"Sophistry" and "Entitlement". Right. So if I pay for the packets, why should Google have to pay for them? If Google pays for packets, why should I have to pay for them? If the ISP refuses to separate this into different services, then why should they bill both of us for the same service?
Wonder when it got to the point where expecting the service one pays for was "entitlement".
but what would happen if T-Mobile told the Cingular customer that he or she must sign a contract with T-Mobile for $1000/minute, or else T-Mobile will cut off the T-Mobile customer's service? What if T-Mobile announced that every person in the world must pay $1000/minute in order to prevent it from cutting off that T-Mobile customer's service?
At worst, if the Cingular Customer refused to pay T-Mobile, T-Mobile would refuse to let their customer call the Cingular Customer. If none of the Cingular users paid, then the T-Mobile users wouldn't have their phone service cut off (where the hell did this idea come from?) they simply wouldn't be able to call any Cingular users. Of course, if they tried, it would just ring forever (or have shitty line quality, or be redirected to a paying customer, or...), after all, if T-Mobile told their customers the truth about why their friends aren't answering the phone, they might lose customers.
Or, if you don't like that analogy, how about the mail? I pay to send mail. If I send more mail, I pay more. I pay and send you a letter, and your post office calls me and tells me they have your letter, but I'll need to pay again in order to have it delivered. Google pays their ISP to send packets. They pay their ISP more to send more packets. Now your ISP is calling.
The average slashdotter would say "yes", but the average libertarian would respond with "Why did the government grant T-Mobile a monopoly? Let's fix that." Personally, I'm with the libertarians.
Sure, let's see the government break ATT again, while simultaneously breaking all of the franchise contracts across the country. What, it's not going to happen any time soon? Well, then I guess we diverge. I'll go with "slap this bandaid on it to keep it from bleeding out and dying", you go with "oooo pretty red fountain". Meanwhile, I'll go back to saving my pennies so I can start a company to run conduit underneath cities and sell space to anyone who wants, putting an end to the natural monopoly. Should only take a few million years at my current pay rate.
Also, if you're going to complain that network neutrality is "communism" then you're going to have to talk REAL fast to cover Edward Whitacre's apparent belief that they somehow "deserve" payment for Google's success. After all, isn't taking from the successful and giving to the rest the very essence of communism?
I'd even go further, if they charge me to use a service that's already paid for by Google, then I believe that is essentially fraud. If SBC/ATT does start charging Google every time I visit their website, then I should receive a rebate or at least a credit on my account for the amount of service ATT provided to me that Google paid for.
I can then use the extra money to pay for all of the formerly free services that suddenly had to start paying 5000 ISPs instead of just their own ISP.
Net neutrality *actually* means everyone pays the same for net use, regardless of how much they use the net.
Net non-neutrality means people pay according to how much they use.
Two things:
1) AT&T sold me "unlimited internet access". If they wanted me to pay for how much I use, they should have specified that in the contract.
2) AT&T does not have a contract with Google and therefore has no real right to charge Google anything, since Google does not use their ISP service, I use it.
Or are you going to claim that if you have a Cingular cellphone and call a friend with a T-Mobile cellphone, then T-Mobile has the right to bill you an unspecified amount (say... $1000/minute, it's not like I have a contract letting me know how much I'm going to be billed for the call in advance) for the call in addition to what I paid Cingular?
Akamai isn't controlling the bandwidth to my house, if CNN pays for it and MSNBC does not, it does not somehow make MSNBC slower than it was before CNN paid, furthermore Akamai is not competing with MSNBC or CNN as the current internet providers are with VoIP services like Vonage.
It's a nice feel-good piece about how having money gets you places, but it has absolutely nothing to do with SBC's (now ATT) CEO demanding that they somehow deserve some of Google's money. In the section where the interviewer asks "what if there's only one ISP" he talks about how there's plenty of competition for "ISP services" like email while entirely glossing over the fact that if you've only got one ISP, and the ISP decides you only get to use their email (or VoIP or blog or...), you're boned.
He also throws out the tired old stuff about packet inspection and worm filtering, but in a world where the stated goal of the ISPs is specifically to attack Google, the "network non-neutrality" they are after will do none of this. It will look no farther than "did this packet come from a company that paid their protection fees this month" and deal with it appropriately, after all, the more they do the more expensive their equipment gets.
Bottom line, my opinion, users are not lazy, they just want to get some work done without needing the equivalent of a Bachelor's in Computer Science to get that work done.
The problem is that people insist that everything be as simple as a toaster, regardless of the actual complexity of the task. It's easy to say "narrow down the task until it fits", it's harder to figure out how to drive a car using one rarely-used slider and one button.
It was the soon to be disbanded Oil for food program
Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of corruption (from many different companies and countries, including at least one US oil company), replaced by a billion dollar program that would "pay for Iraqi's reconstruction" with such wonderful things as KBR spending $75 million of our taxes failing to build a pipeline its own consultants said could not be built. And now we have US judges basically green-lighting rampant fraud against Americans by claiming that even if a company has a contract with "The United States of America", the US has no legal jurisdiction to charge companies with fraud when they do things like steal forklifts and sell them to the government. Of course, the US (or the CPA the US created to rule Iraq if you're seriously going to consider it somehow not a part of the US) can't even account for somewhere between 8 and 9 Billion dollars, I guess we're really showing the UN "how it's done".
After all the flack that GWB took for not stopping 9-11 when there was intel
Almost all of that flack was fired back when the Republicans started attacking Clinton for not doing anything about it either. Funny how that works, when it's convenient, Republicans call it "wagging the dog", likewise when it's convenient, it suddenly becomes "not doing anything". The same behavior pops up in other situations as well, after all, who needs innocent until proven guilty, except for DeLay?
why would you support attacking N. Korea and NOT support attacking Iraq?
Hindsight is 20/20? We know now that the intelligence was incorrect at best (suicides of British naysayers notwithstanding), so there's less reason to support the Iraq war, especially after we dug Saddam out of his little hole and no longer have to worry about those 1.5 million people killed and his planned attacks on America and his WMDs old or new. Now our soldiers are standing around over there, with no apparent plan beyond "surge another 40k troops and hope that the soldiers somehow convince the Sunnis and the Shiites to kiss and make up their centuries of hatred". Most likely, there'll be civil war, and since nobody in our government learns from history, we'll support one side, they'll win, and the other side will be pissed off and start blowing up our buildings while the side we supported uses the weapons we gave them against our allies.
As for Korea, we can continue this better safe then sorry ideal, but maybe, just maybe, we should talk to South Korea first and make sure they're ready to deal with a northern vacuum. Who knows, maybe we can just walk in, be greeted with parades and flower girls, catch ol' Kim in a few days, and South Korea will just take over from there and the war will cost less than redrawing all the maps. Probably no chance in hell of that though, but why can't we all dream like the Republicans?
Not to start an argument, but if the "constant barrage of unconstitutionality" baffles you then maybe, just maybe, your interpretation of unconstitutionality is wrong?
I don't know, given the reactions of the Republicans who naturally trotted out the "changing presidents during a war is a sign of weakness!" despite the fact that we've done it many times now, I'd say that they certainly believe an impeachment could succeed.
The much deeper question is whether violating the Constitution or his oath of office is actually an impeachable offense. With his signing statement in direct opposition to the law he signed and swore to execute faithfully, he has apparently done both.
I'm sure the Capital-One mailings are worth opening. Might be something in those about setting off a nuclear bomb somewhere.
The government has already frozen accounts of a person for trying to pay off his credit cards. Who knows, maybe this "Capital-One" is actually a terrorist outfit, the government certainly appears to believe Mastercard is.
Aside from that, without an oversight process, your Capital One mailings probably ARE worth opening, to the right people. After all, it's not like they have to explain to anyone why they were opening them, and you're certainly not going to notice if one or two go missing.
95% of it are just crappy ass Capital-One credit card offers anyways.
And all of the highly paid employees who will be assigned to read your mail are angels who would never be tempted to misplace some of your identity, right?
Or by developers do they mean "people who have downloaded the API docs"?
They're outside developers, so I'm pretty sure thats what they mean.
Finally, if you are a law abiding American citzen or law abiding resident then you should have nothing to worry about.
:)
Here in Houston I can give you an entire litany of the government attacking law abiding citizens, from the "K-Mart raid" to "DNA lab scandals" to "'incorrect' expert testimony" (funny how the prosecutors never get around to prosecuting their own witnesses for perjury, isn't it? They always claim it was a "mistake" yet my tax money still goes to these so-called "experts") to "corrupt district attorney".
So, simply put, your statement is wrong. Have a nice day, though
It's a good thing we don't set national policies based on the interperations of all the arm-chair supreme court justices on slashdot.
Is that all you've got? Usually ad hominem attacks resort to foul language to drive their pointlessness home.
How about this: you explain why my expectation that the president either follow the law or veto it is wrong.
Have you been arrested for what you are typing?
You still have this idea that the government is not censoring anyone, but when sheriffs detain you for calling the head of the TSA an idiot, you lose. There is no legitimate argument to support that. It has nothing to do with security or bomb threats, or any other potentially legitimate excuse. Just because the government hasn't smashed in my skull for claiming Bush is an idiot doesn't change the fact that the government has detained people for calling members of the federal government idiots.
It only has to happen once for the government to have crossed the line. It happened, the line was crossed.
He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.
"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Now that he is directly countermanding the bills he passes, can we not finally admit that Bush has broken his oath as President?
but rather his view of the law.
Or are you claiming is that despite "his view of the law" he's not going to order anyone to open mail?
by being cooperatively owned by those who live on them.
This is a double edged weapon as well. I've heard of cases where companies who wanted to raze everything and redevelop the neighborhood into something else managed to buy 51% of the houses in the neighborhood, then used their majority to force the community to repave all the roads. Repeatedly. Until the people who had refused to sell their houses were driven out by hundred thousand dollar bills for the pavement.
Ciber is not banned from TESTING, but from certifying the machines as properly tested.
That's like saying that if the government decided to quit allowing people to drive Fords, it wouldn't be banning Ford from making automobiles.
Explain why anyone would have Ciber test their equipment if Ciber can't certify it?
Although your point about the phone network is possible, there are other ways to subsidize than to create monopolies.
What the government should have done is install and maintain conduit, which would have solved the "natural monopoly" problem in the first place by providing ample space for X companies to run N strands of wire/fiber/whatever without the "oh noes, my road is being torn up every three months" syndrome of letting them run the wire themselves.
But hey, this way they could get megabucks from corporations in return for promising them the ability to deliver shitty service.
Years ago, when I grew up in Texas, our legislature only met every other year because every time they met, new laws got passed.
It's still that way, it's always been that way, and for the foreseeable future I think I can safely say that we're still not going to trust them enough to let those rascals get together any more often than that.
Hey I tell you what how about I open a few in your house?
You'll kill one person, maybe.
Hardly a weapon of Mass Destruction.